Re: u-boot for beagleboard

["Miguel Ángel Arruga Vivas" <rosen644835@gmail.com>]

Hi Vagrant and Danny,

First of all, I cannot start without saying: thank you for you effort
and time.

Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org> writes:
> On Thu, 01 Oct 2020 10:15:40 -0700
> Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org> wrote:
>> Maybe make-u-boot-package should be extended to support passing a list
>> of "common" names for boards, which could then be appended to the
>> description?
>
> Translators should say what they think about that.

As a translator I could have a personal say, but the best practices are
already encoded on gettext manual[1].

> (Long ago, I stopped doing string concatenations like this because
> translating that into some languages isn't easy)

Thank you for raising awareness of this.  I've seen plenty of bad
translations because of this anti-pattern, and some of them are
hilarious.

> Other than that, sure, something like that would be nice.
>
> Maybe just make it possible to add any sentence(s) to the description,
> though.  That should be translatable enough... I think.

I see two main possibilities for the "translation units" in these cases:

- When the extra data is a "non-localizable string", I'd rather use a
  format string for the template, and insert the data through the format
  specifier, possibly with a message to the translators to make clearer
  the inserted data if it isn't clearly deduced from the message:
----------------------8<----------------------
(let ((desc (format #f
                    ;; TRANSLATORS: ~a is substituted by the board ids.
                    (_ "Description.~{~% - Board: ~a~}~%")
                    (list "id1" "id2" ... "idn"))))
  ...)
---------------------->8----------------------

- In any other case, I'd concatenate them as two separate paragraphs[2]
  and let the translators face them up separately:

----------------------8<----------------------
(let ((desc (format #f
                    "~s~%~%~s" ; Translating this may be an overkill...
                    (_ "First paragraph(s).")
                    (_ "Other paragraph(s)."))))
  ...)
---------------------->8----------------------

Happy hacking!
Miguel

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Preparing-Strings

[2] My two cents: As a programmer use as few as possible implicit
    references to each other paragraph, please. :-)
    They are ok inside the same translation unit, but they can lead to
    mismatches if the sentence is common and/or short enough to be used
    somewhere else.